Marco Pasi

Marco Pasi (born 1971 in Milan), Italian scholar of Western esotericism at the University of Amsterdam, is among the central figures of the Amsterdam school and has contributed both empirical research and theoretical reflection to the field. His empirical work focuses on the history of Thelema — the magical-philosophical system developed by Aleister Crowley — and on the relationship between esotericism and political ideology in the twentieth century. His theoretical contributions address the definitional problem of "esotericism" as a scholarly category: what does it mean to say that a text, practice, or movement belongs to the Western esoteric tradition, and what epistemic and ethical implications follow from such a classification? Trained at the European University Institute in Florence and formed intellectually within the Amsterdam school under Wouter Hanegraaff, Pasi represents a second generation of esotericism scholars who have consolidated and extended the Amsterdam methodological framework while also pushing it toward new empirical domains — particularly the history of modern occultism — that the school's first generation had left relatively underexplored.

Central Argument

Pasi's most distinctive theoretical contribution is his argument that "esotericism" can function as a valid comparative category if it is understood as a family-resemblance concept rather than an essential property. Against positions that would define esotericism by a fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions (the approach of Antoine Faivre's typology) or dissolve it entirely as a mere scholarly projection (the most radical constructivist position), Pasi argues for a middle path: esotericism names a loosely connected family of practices, texts, and institutions sharing overlapping but not identical features, and the boundaries of this family are themselves objects of historical investigation rather than methodological stipulations. This approach allows him to study Aleister Crowley's Thelema — combining elements from the Hermetic Qabalah, Neoplatonism, Eastern religious traditions, and Crowley's own mythology — as genuinely esoteric without having to decide whether it is "really" continuous with earlier Hermetic traditions or represents a radical break. The question of continuity and rupture in esoteric history is, for Pasi, itself a historical question to be answered through empirical research rather than definitional stipulation.

Key Works

Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (Acumen, 2014; Italian original, Mondadori, 1999) examines the intersections between Crowley's magical system and the political ideologies — fascism, nationalism, anarchism, libertarianism — he encountered across his long career. Pasi argues that Crowley's relationship to politics was not simply opportunism or provocation but reflects genuine tensions within Thelemic thought itself — particularly between its individualism (the Law of Thelema: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law") and its rhetoric of hierarchy and mastery. This work opens a broader research programme on the relationship between modern Western esotericism and political ideology. His theoretical articles in Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism address definitional questions about esotericism and the epistemological implications of studying contemporary esoteric movements alongside ancient and medieval traditions.

Scholarly Lineage and Disputes

Pasi's primary intellectual debts are to Hanegraaff's methodological writings — particularly the concept of "esotericism" as a modern scholarly construction that should be historicised rather than simply deployed — and to the broader tradition of the sociology of knowledge. He has engaged in productive dialogue with Kocku von Stuckrad on the question of whether esotericism is best understood as a "discourse" (von Stuckrad's term, drawing on Foucault) or as a set of practices and institutions (a more sociological framing). His engagement with Crowley places him in dialogue with alchemy's modern historiographers and with cultural historians who have examined the relationship between esoteric movements and modernity more broadly, including Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and Egil Asprem.

Literature

Pasi, Marco. Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics. Durham: Acumen, 2014.
Pasi, Marco. "The Neverendingly Told Story: Recent Biographies of Aleister Crowley." Aries 3 (2003): 224–245.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. Esotericism and the Academy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Von Stuckrad, Kocku. Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge. London: Equinox, 2005.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Occult Roots of Nazism. London: I.B. Tauris, 1985.
Asprem, Egil. Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012.